As a longtime installer and solar engineer, I’ve seen many single-axis tracker failures over the last two decades. Failures from wind, bad designs, wrong materials, poor planning, and EPC errors (root cause usually a bad design). Tracker trend was to reduce steel to lower cost, thinning out to excess only to encounter wind failures; the knee-jerk reaction was to apply shock absorbers, springs, multi-faceted torque tubes (e.g., complexity, cost,....
Solar projects are best started with a solid understanding of the ground upon which the project will be constructed. Achieving that goal was a challenge on a recent project in Texas. A client requested a magnetometer survey of the site due to its original use for oil and gas drilling and production activities. Normal well plugging and abandonment involves removing the equipment and cutting off the top few feet of the well casing below the ground.....
Energy Storage Systems (ESS) are one of the hottest sectors in renewable energy today. Established manufacturers with growing popularity in the renewable industry, along with upcoming unknown innovators, are racing to create the latest ESS hardware and software technologies. These new systems will account for spikes in energy demand as well as long-duration power generation for the times when wind and solar are not actively producing. Lately, man....
Propelled by market force and policies that support investment and deployment of large-scale projects, the solar industry is booming. But the industry now faces the increasing challenge of land --finding and securing enough of it to accommodate the utility-scale solar (plus storage) that we’ll need to achieve the clean energy transition. As Bloomberg stated in a recent analysis, “The U.S. will need a lot of land for a zero-carbon econ....
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